Parties don’t get to choose the byelections that they contest, but if Ukip had to choose a seat to fight, Stoke-on-Trent Central wouldn’t be a bad choice.

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In last year’s referendum, 69% of voters in Stoke-on-Trent voted Leave. Compared to the other constituencies in the council area, Stoke-on-Trent Central is slightly younger and has more students. That means the Leave share of the vote in Tristram Hunt’s seat is probably slightly smaller. Despite that, the seat is still comfortably in the top 100 most Leave-leaning seats in the country. Some parts of the country voted strongly to leave without having displayed much previous interest in Ukip – but the party also did well in the 2015 general election. There were about 30 seats where it did better in terms of vote share – but a number of those seats feature sizeable Conservative majorities, and so are less winnable.

The fact that the seat is held by Labour also makes this an appealing byelection for Ukip. In the longer-term, Ukip will have to find a new raison d’être – but in the short-term, its best hope of winning byelections is to turn them into referendums on Brexit. (This is also the best short-term strategy for the Liberal Democrats, for the opposite reason.)

In seats held by the Conservatives, it would be difficult for Ukip to win a fight between two parties committed to leaving. But in seats held by Labour, Ukip can try to poach votes from the Conservatives, votes which would not ordinarily have gone to the party were it not for the heightened importance of Brexit. Since Ukip just pipped the Conservatives to second place last time round, it can make a credible claim to be the best choice for voters who want to step up the pressure for a short, sharp Brexit.

These are all sound reasons why Ukip will do well in Stoke-on-Trent. So will it win? In my view, and in the view of most bookies, Labour has to be the favourite. Because of poor turnout (under 50%), Hunt’s majority in the last election was small in absolute terms – a shade over 5,000 votes – but large in percentage terms (16.7%). Byelections can result in huge swings: the swing towards the Liberal Democrats in Richmond Park last December was more than 30%. Usually, however, these swings come at the expense of governing parties, not parties of opposition. In byelections this parliament, Labour has increased its vote share more often than not.

If Ukip doesn’t win, or doesn’t run Labour close, that calls into question its ability to win parliamentary seats. Since Ukip has so far been able to shape the future of the UK without much in the way of parliamentary representation, that might not matter – but it would suggest that the referendum, far from being a staging post on the road to supplanting Labour, might signal Ukip’s peak.